The small picture is of an ailing British government heading for existential meltdown. The big picture is that the United Kingdom has been holed beneath the waterline, with no recovery possible. What does a failed democratic state look like? We might soon find out. Moreover, wherever the UK goes might well be the destination for much of Western Europe: Yes, the situation is that bad.
The Prime Minister responsible for putting the UK (as opposed to just Britain) on a path to disaster was Anthony Blair, a psychopathic snake-oil salesman whose charming smile and boyish demeanour of some thirty years ago concealed his real nature as a demonic and Cromwellian iconoclast. His gigantic, obsessive egotism dwarfed all the various personal characteristics combined within what was a powerful cabinet. Many of its members had the qualities to be prime ministers, but just one would be: His dour, honest, son-of-the-manse chancellor Gordon Brown, the nearest thing to a “good man” in Blair’s government. After a decade of misgovernment, Blair finally surrendered the leadership of a doomed administration to Brown, while the exiting prime minister jetted off into a wonderland of his own deranged imagination.
That of course was where Blair has lived his entire life: Within his own mind. He invented a state called the United Kingdom, which he emotionally and mentally inhabited without knowing much about it. This why he effectively surrendered to the IRA on its terms. His personal shallowness was manifested in his accent, which was initially Scottish but which during his tenure in Downing Street mutated into not just English, but estuary English containing the half-glottal stops of the Cockneys that he would figuratively sentence to death. It says something about his time in power, and the finality it spelt for much of UK life, that it is now necessary to describe what Cockneys were. They were white working-class Londoners born within the sound of the bells of the Norman church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. It almost certainly was built on an Anglo-Saxon church, which in turn was probably built on a Roman temple, and so on. What is absolutely clear is that not even the Great Fire of London changed the city so much as Blair did. When buildings are replaced, they usually do so on existing street-plans: Changing the population is a quite different and irreversible process.
That is what Blair did, secretly, and without a manifesto-promise, making that part of London effectively a suburb of Karachi. During his reign – the correct term – the UK imported more foreigners than had arrived throughout its entire history. Admittedly, mass-immigration had been a feature of British life since the 1960s, but it reached population-replacement levels only under Blair. During that demographic earthquake, a society that had historically depended on, and been defined by, trust and patriotism, was torn apart.
Nearly as disastrous, and certainly as immoral, was Blair’s decision to join the USA in its catastrophic war in Iraq. To do this, he lied. So too did his press secretary Alastair Campbell. What the two men also had in common was that they were high-alpha males, and despite their deplorable personal records when in government, post-government they have prospered. If one needs a parable about the injustices of life, the Blairbell duo provides it.
It was during their co-governance of Britain that another monstrous crime was perpetrated upon the British people: the mass rape of white working class girls by Pakistani men. Not coincidentally, the Chief Crown Prosecutor for much of this period was today’s prime minister Blair Starmer, and the oiler-in-chief of Blair’s political machine was Peter Mandelson. This quartet put a curse on British life that survived the Tories’ return to power and their lamentable governments under Cameron, Johnson, May, Truss and Sunak, just one of whom matched Blairbell in rank dishonesty, Johnson, but with few of the catastrophic after-effects.
Surviving successive scandals throughout, repeatedly rising from the ashes of several burnt-out careers was Mandelson, a phoney creature in a phoney “socialist” party. It is said of him that when he first visited a chip shop in his hand-picked, safe constituency in Hartlepool he saw a saucepan of mushy peas: “Guacamole! How simply scrumptious. A large portion please.”
Like Blairbell, entitlement infused his every atom, assisted by a remarkable memory: When I met him twenty-five years ago, he instantly remembered a column of mine which he had, quite miraculously, read and he complimented me on it. Flattery came as easily to him as digesting yoghurt, and he slid through life like an eel through the Sargasso at its greasiest until he landed his plumb and final job, His Majesty’s Ambassador to Washington. Apart from status, he loved money: “I do not want to live by salary alone,” Mandelson whinnied to Jeffrey Epstein in an email on Christmas Day 2010. “That’s why I need to do as much as possible to build with JPM [JP Morgan].”
This, not from some grasping Tory, but from the Labour MP that had represented a constituency with an average annual income £32,800 per family. His co-villain, Epstein, was not – as is repeatedly claimed – convicted of “paedophilia”, which involves pre-pubescent children. His serious offence was knowingly having sex with under-age girls in their teens, to whom he lured that unpleasant dolt Prince Andrew, who was incapable of telling 17 from 7-Up. One wonders: Might Mandelson have found personally extenuating circumstances for Epstein’s serial crimes with underage nymphets?
What is clear that his serpentine charm bewitched that unprincipled, benightedly-knighted halfwit Starmer, for whom the latter’s political architect, the Irishman Morgan McSweeney, fell on his sword over the weekend. Was not employing a foreigner from such a strongly-Brexit country in such a vital role something of a give-away about Starmer’s Euro-priorities? Either way, Starmer will probably soon follow. That a possible contender as his replacement is his former deputy, the red-haired Angela Rayner, says a great deal about what is acceptable in British politics. She once sat knickerlessly in the front bench with her thighs wide-apart to expose her her “ginger growler” – as she later proudly recounted – to Prime Minister Johnson to confuse him mid-speech. Was this really possible in the Palace of Westminster? Yes indeed, with the kind of wanton harlotry that is beyond all contemplation anywhere else in Europe, but a reasonably accurate measure of the abyss to which the poor United Kingdom has been reduced. But like watching a one-legged Congolese virgin-snowboarder pushing off for a double-inverted aerial at Livigno, be prepared for much, much worse still to come.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Blair to Starmer, the UK’s serial decay led by despicable PMs